Sigaw ng Bayan defends their web stats

{ from Inq7.net }

Remember the alleged 9 Million web hits calimed by Sigaw ng Bayan two weeks ago? Well, the guy (Raul Lambino) responded back to Mrs. Cunanan about the huge debate on the blogosphere.

He wrote:

“Visitor bandwidth usage averages 2 gigabytes daily for only around 200 pages that compose the entire website so far (one gigabyte is equivalent to one thousand megabytes; to illustrate how big it is, an ordinary floppy diskette is equivalent to 1.4 megabytes). Any website administrator knows that this figure is half the maximum monthly bandwidth allowance of a regular webhosting service. The www.sigawngbayan.com uses a static sitemeter.

“What this means is simple: It relies on the access logs automatically rolled daily by its webhost providers. It does not employ free sitemeters that abound in the electronic world. Most free sitemeters come expensive as their providers flood administrators’ e-mail boxes with spam (unwanted e-mails) which come from third parties the freegivers share the user’s address to. This ‘gateway’ is used by better-educated techies to enter into the bowels of a site, play around for sometime, and leave the administrators with severe headaches.

“In short, we hold our site’s security very seriously and that credibility of statistics is the better judgment call for us, rather than rapidity of reports — the latter serving only to satisfy the amusement of nosey know-it-alls.

“We do not also use our webhost’s counters menu since they tend to display dissimilar hits reports, as a site can be viewed either as www.sigawngbayan.com or simply sigawngbayan.com. Chances are one URL or web address will be visited more than the other variant. We can only imagine how this seeming discrepancy would again be used to pummel our down-to-earth intent of promoting people’s initiative.

“We will not belabor the fact that the aesthetics of the pre-programmed counters of our webhost do not conform to our website layout using advance software. If only we are not protecting the identities of site visitors who support our crusade, but meantime want to remain anonymous, we would be more than willing to make public the access logs of www.sigawngbayan.com, so opinion makers would not waste precious column space to question an insignificant, grassroots-operated and volunteer-funded website hits’ stats. There they can see that indeed, a phenomenon is really happening in a people’s website, courtesy of visitors coming largely from the United States, Australia, the Middle East, China and many countries abroad, including a single computer terminal from Congo that’s being used to access the Sigaw website faithfully two times a day since April 15.”

Can somebody, please point them to Google Analytics!

So, it’s really 9 millions hits huh? Go search for “sigaw ng bayan” on Google and click on the top result. I’m sure I’ll get the same 9 million hits in the next couple of weeks.